Sunset over Gallifrey
by Ignoramus
Summary: Plot: After a ordeal that leaves both of them shaken, Rose finally finds out what the sun looks like over Gallifrey... SPOILERS FOR JOURNEY'S END
1. Chapter 1

This is a new story inspired by the impulse to continue the story from Rose's final scene in Journey's End. While RTD may have finished with Ten/Rose, he has opened up a new canon scenario for us writers to play with :D Please review.

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Prologue

They just stood there, just staring at each other, for one long moment. The Doctor and his Rose, face to face, did little more in those first few seconds than gawk at each other in utter amazement, trying to take it all in. Not a soul stirred on Bad Wolf Bay as the Doctor swallowed hard to get his voice working,

"I... never dreamed..."

The enormity of their situation had by this time rendered Rose completely incapable of speech and scarcely able to keep herself upright. This man was the same and yet, in that immediate moment, so different.

The deafening silence of that moment was cut abruptly short by a loud refrain of "Crazy Frog" and the two of them whipped around to find themselves with a rather irritated Jackie Tyler.

"Pete! You lummock, where've you been eh? Down the pub, I'll bet! Here's me stuck in Norway... yes, _Norway_, and you've been at the booze again!"

The Doctor rolled his eyes and looked at Rose, who caught his eye and smiled, despite herself. Some things, she realised, never changed.

"Come on you two! Let's find a coffee shop somewhere..."

They both followed Jackie away from the sandy shore, content for now with each other's company. The few small words whispered in Rose's ear still echoed, resonant with meaning, between them; the Prologue had been said, but Act One was yet to begin.


	2. Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

Rose watched him in the back of the car, an irate Jackie Tyler providing an unwelcome soundtrack to her musings. The man sitting next to her drummed his fingers on pinstripe trousers and stared out of the window, unseeing. Rose knew him well enough to realise his shields were back in place, all emotion tucked beneath a cast-iron surface.

The Doctor stared out at green fields on the way home from the airport, remembered where they were heading - the home of Jackie Tyler - and knew fear.

The car stopped directly in front of what appeared a majestic old house, so different from the Powell Estate Rose had grown up on. As everyone got out, the Doctor reached for Rose's hand and turned her around to face him. She looked up, saw the reluctance in his eyes and sighed. It appeared that this Doctor didn't do domestic either.

"Want chips?" He wiggled his fingers in hers and half-smiled enticingly.

She stared and swallowed hard as she remembered their first date, so long ago now, back when he had blue eyes and a more crotechety disposition.

"Mum, the Doctor wants out. We'll be back in a few hours, 'kay?"

Jackie could hardly refuse them now. "Alright, but be careful. If I find out he's got you in another mess..."

Rose just smiled, kissed her mother on the cheek and told her not to wait up. She tugged on the Doctor's hand and he followed her gratefully down the gravel path.

On the road, they didn't speak for a long, long, time. Each was absorbed in their own thoughts and it was only when an angry driver honked his horn as he passed that they realised they had strayed onto the motorway that they stopped. The Doctor steered her towards a rugged clearing through which a dirt track had been beaten through the grass, and they walked on without caring where they were going.

"He was an idiot, to leave you like this."

The statement, completely out of the blue, shook Rose to the quick in seconds. "Don't say that."

"No, it's true. He left you, Rose. He dumped you with me on a parallel universe so he didn't have to remember."

"Remember what?"

"What I did. Clearly, saving the universe wasn't enough."

Rose growled at his arrogance, "You murdered the entire Dalek race!"

"That was necessary."

"But we stopped their plan! There was nothing they could do - they were defenceless. And you murdered them. You didn't even give them a chance!"

"You can't give a Dalek a chance, Rose."

"Everything deserves to live, Doctor! You can't hide behind a gun and pretend you're doing the right thing!"

"Look, you just don't understand -"

"Don't tell me I don't understand, Doctor! How can I understand you when... you're not him?"

There, she had said it. And the paleness of his thin face as he stared at her contrasted so sharply in that moment with his eyes, to fathomless depths of emotion so raw she could not look away.

"Why? Why don't you trust me?"

She stopped in front of him, voice shaking. "Y-you're a murderer." The Doctor dimly recognised the after effects of shock kicking in as he realised that the impact of his actions had only now kicked in. "My Doctor - the Doctor I knew - would never, never murder anyone. He didn't even kill you!"

"No." Truly angry now, he captured her wrist so fiercely that it hurt, forcing her gaze towards him. "He handed me over to you, to domesticate, to fashion me into who he wants me to be . Your Doctor was too perfect to deal with me himself, of course, wasn't he?"

She saw the Oncoming Storm then, in the fire of his eyes reflecting in windows to his very soul, and gasped in awe despite herself.

"He was too good for you!"

He saw the flicker of gold in Rose's eyes and realised that the Bad Wolf, the being whom he thought was gone for good, was right there as it had been all along... and it was was breathtakingly beautiful.

He turned to her, the whites of his eyes showing, right hand subconsciously running itself through his hair. Dimly, Rose realised he was shaking. He let go of her wrist and stumbled away as fast as he could, whilst for Rose the mental strain became too much and she sank weightlessly to the dark forest floor.


	3. Chapter 3

A/N: Disclaimer. I own nothing except for a dubious imagination.

I keep forgetting to put those disclaimers in... never have been good at doing the obvious, eh?

My dear friend Charlie Montgomery Percival Chainsaw, for those of you who remember him, is doing well. The other day, we were both watching the Doctor Who re-runs at some small hour of the morning (guilty pleasures) and Charlie was complaining about not being Spock enough to impress Wendy Spanner, queen of the Toolbox. I then did some research and realised that it really was possible to make a chainsaw more sonic by installing a large flashing blue light just above the blade - which Charlie then begged me not to do, because he thought that would look onsiderably more gay than Spock.

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The Doctor ran as best he could, past the endless trees, and eventually sank to the floor when he became exhausted to go any further and lay spread-eagled on the ground. He would have sprinted on, though, if it meant putting more distance between himself and Rose.

It was very easy he thought, watching a plump raindrop fall earthwards and land next to him, to hate her for saying that to him. Right now, it was so very tempting for him to simply hate, to block out all else and surrender to the pain of rejection that was almost pleasant in its intensity. A murderer, indeed! The defiance in him flashed to the surface again as he remembered how his other self had acted. It was alright to wear your heart on your sleeve when it came to Rose - no, _because_ of Rose - it seemed. You could duel with aliens in pyjamas and claim you gave "no second chances". All you had to do was remind people that you were sorry, before they died for you. And yet it was barbaric to kill for Rose, to protect her, so that she could live safe, even though he himself suffered because he had killed anyone who might try to hurt her, stupid, silly ape that she was. Why did he have her hatred when he craved her love?

The rain was falling harder now, and above him a parallel storm was approaching as the sky disappeared and bloated rain clouds covered the surface. The rage welled up in him, desperate and powerful, as his own memories turned traitor and forced him to recall the events of the Time War, to compare that which he had felt then with what threatened to overpower him now. In that moment, he was barely human, given over to the terrible knowledge that he was powerless, trapped here on a parallel Earth, to protect what he loved. The aliens would come - they always did. But now there was nothing he could do. Time seemed to stand still as the once mighty Time Lord, the last child of Gallifrey, realised his fate and determined to override the gods and join those who had indefatigably died for him.

It was right then, from deep within the depths of his suffering, that his spirit felt Rose and he turned pale with dread. Leaping to his feet, he looked around him, saw thick black smoke billowing through the slanting rain and ran instinctively in terror back the way he had come. All he knew was that he shouldn't have been able to feel her... unless something was very, very wrong.

Rose had, in her mental exhaustion, fallen into an extremely deep and grateful stupor at the foot of a large and noble oak tree, that had succumbed to the winter many years ago and was now a hollow shell. Without warning, a single shaft of lightening burnt up the air as it passed and hit the tree. Ageing wood was blasted by an inferno of heat and spontaneously combusted, at a frighteningly quick pace. The flames roared into life without warning, evaporating the rain and blazing with phenomenal power.

With a slow, screeching crack the upper part of the tree split untidily into two and crashed to the ground as two curving towers of fire, surrounding Rose's small sleeping form in a circle. And still the girl slumbered on, curled into a ball at the foot of the tree, now kept from consciousness as much from a lack of oxygen as anything else.

She was thus dead to the world when the Doctor dashed in, seconds after the start of the fire; the strength of his feelings on seeing this, apparantly peaceful in the face of almost certain death, brought on emotion so strong that he was afraid he wouldn't cope without use of his second heart. Despite himself, before his still-very-much-Time Lord brain kicked in, he stood there, dripping wet, momentarily transfixed; because the image before his eyes represented so much what she could do to him. She was was the Bad Wolf who did not fear the Oncoming Storm, let alone its broken human shadow created solely through rage and despair.

And then... his thoughts were composed and he was automatically calculating distances in his head, shaking his sodden fringe away from his eyes, working with a determination that was almost certainly beyond human. Because, for all his faults, he had been created in the throes of a regeneration the Doctor had been desperate to survive; and the resulting desire to live had left him considerably expedient in the face of extreme danger.

"ROSE! WAKE UP!" The girl slept on, completely impervious to his frantic yells.

He tried for a further 13 seconds, until his lips were blue and he was too afraid for her to risk things any longer. A large, flaming bough was swinging over her even now from a nearby branch that had ignited under the heat. Just a little longer and it would fall. The heat from the flames had flushed his face by now; he was perspiring and he shuddered to think what was happening to Rose, whom he could hardly even see now from within the flames. There was nothing he could do; short of what could only be the final option.

Had he been a Time Lord, he would have done what he did next without thinking. But here he was, so concerned with his own safety that he was letting his most beloved girl slip from between his fingers.

The stubborn side of him argued that he was being ridiculous; his thinking capacity was 2.573 recurring times faster than humans. He had 23 senses! He could recite Pi to 500,000 decimal places without stopping for breath, thanks to his respiratory by-pass. And he could imagine the whole of old Costella Nine, all those professors who had failed him back at the Academy on Gallifrey, all of them laughing at his helplessness. He sniffed. He rubbed his nose fiercely with the back of his hand. He could do this. For Rose; and her name became an unspoken prayer as he felt a silent tear run down his cheek, knowing the nerve-shattering pain his simple human body was going to have to endure.

He looked inwards, concentrating hard, feeling the air around him gradually heat up around him as a simple energy exchange took place and his core temperature lowered far below his surroundings; enough to freeze his nerves for a few small seconds. He held up his hands in front of his face, wincing at the pain as his blood turned to biological anti-freeze, struggling its way through icy veins. He waited until his nerves were numb, feeling all sensation, all coherent thought leave his brain. Knowing that running would waste valuable energy, he walked through the towering inferno, scooped the small, almost weightless bundle in his blue, numb arms and calmly stepped back out again. And then as his temperature inevitably heightened and sensation returned he fled through the ever-flowing rain as fast as he could, anything to ease the terrible agony, with only one idea still ingrained in his exhausted nervous system; he put as much distance between himself and that fire as he possibly could.

When he could run no longer, he fell.

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Please review for cookies and a very happy chainsaw!


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